I know I’m not alone in working in IT around here, and probably also not alone in having to deal with a variety of users with a variety of levels of IT literacy, competence, common sense etc. We all deal with some stupid requests, most likely.

This one has taken the cake, for today at least. We’ve gone through quite a large folder structure migration, 5 seperate drives into one, several terabytes of data migrated, security groups changed, etc etc. In amongst the chaos of a Monday morning where everyone’s old, convenient, shortcuts have stopped working and people are running round like headless chickens instead of just patiently searching the new single drive for their file, I get the following:

“My keyboard’s broken”
“Broken how?”
“It’s not working properly”
“…Care to expand on that? Specific keys not working? Pressing A types a G or other?”
“When I press Caps Lock, the little light doesn’t come on.”
“…But you still get block capitals?”
“Yes.”
“… < sounds as of head being drummed on desk > …”
“Can I have a new keyboard, then?”

I really do despair…

edit:deleted

you are not alone.  Some stuff I can’t even talk about, it’s the only way to stay sane

Are you my wife writing under a false name?

on the other side I spent some time this morning repairing our financial systems after someone had messed things up but I was actually really happy because they had got stuck at a problem and tried to work round it rather than just throwing their hands in the air, blaming the system and downing tools.  I can live with those sorts of problems as they give me hope.  Machines are taking over slowly and not by force, just by slowly sapping people’s ability to think 🙁

A few years ago a client rang us it a state of unbridled extreme vehement anger that her website wasn’t working and it was her main source of income and that we were 100% liable for any loss of earnings whilst it was down.

I typed the business URL into the browser and her site popped up straight away. So I asked her just to double check that her internet connection was working properly by going to a website that was highly unlikely to be inaccessible such as the BBC website.

She said ‘I can’t do that, BT are doing some work in the office and the internet is down at the moment’.

We have recently had a “new” IT system in place with the usual folders being “moved” around (hide under another folder or rename) but the people wasn’t told so as usual me colleagues started cursing the world. Demanded new computers woohoo!

The way I see it the IT dept should have prepared the people first by telling them in advance what changes there would be. Otherwise you will get calls like my mouse is not working, where are my folders etc …

I just tell them to give me all the computers and I need a new superdoper webcam … 😆

Are you my wife writing under a false name?

Other way round, Dave…

I’ve just moved back to a company I used to work for. Ive been here half a day and already the systems require 4 different usernames and two passwords.

For added file and games if you put the wrong username in. It still works, but won’t actually let you do anything. And for even more fun and games, nothing works anyway, so nothing working isn’t a symptom you can use to troubleshoot.

so did they get a new keyboard?

Our software is developed and “tested” by the same people who did the TSB.

The users aren’t our biggest problem.

I’m not in IT but my favourite where I work is when you find a folder and next to it you have a saved shortcut to the same folder. I’ve even seen a shortcut to a shortcut saved. It’s brilliant

Once, many years ago when I used to work in IT Support, this bloke came in and actually said to me, bold as brass “I’ve done something daft and deleted a file, can you help me out?”. I was so nonplussed I just restored it from the backup without even making him log a call with the helpdesk.

And tbf that is a faulty keyboard…

We got the MIL a tablet after she asked for one (did use to use PC’s etc) so she could view pictures of family on Facebook. Took a while, but she got the hang of it.

Anyway, times move on and she is in a Nursing Home now – she still used the tablet, but it’s not been ‘working’. Explained the signal was weak in her room. ‘Can you get me a new one’. Just doesn’t understand it needs a signal, just like her mobile…

It’s all forgiveable as she is 83. Not like the idiots at work !!

About 15 years ago in the drawing office I was in we were running out of server space. The IT dept decided to run a program overnight to automatically delete the .bak files autocad generates to free up space. Did they test it first on a standalone machine? Did they set it to run after the daily auto backup? Did they arse. It deleted everything off the server except the folders. Cue 30 odd blokes carrying pitch forks and torches down to the IT dept in the morning for deleting a full days work.

We are on the other end of things.

Our new IT supplier has so totally and utterly mis-judged, mis-handled and borderline mis-sold Office365/Sharepoint to us that they are paying for new i5/8gb/SSD laptops and desktops all round and paying for upgraded broadband installation in one of the offices.

Sadly they still are not resolving the staff training issues or general lack of simple functionality in the system. As a business we’ve lost about a third of our staff productivity in the last 6 months since the new system was introduced.

Edit:(This by the way is an award winning, highly recommended company with a track record of multiple deployments if office365 and sage as we were sold. They have absolutely no training resources, handbook or instructions for new users.)

Matt ^ is that their fault or the fault of the person(s) responsible for specifying the upgrade? We get it lots where someone is cutting a corner for Brownie Points without understanding why they might need to spend a little more.

office365 and sage

Sage was designed by people that hate simplicity with a deep passion. Office365 has resulted in a daily game of Outlook roulette where I have a one in three chance of it working the first time I open it. Adds a thrill to my otherwise sedentary morning

Let’s just say that the initial brief had two office addresses on, below each listed the machines and thier specs. With a separate section listing four laptops with our remote based staff.

On the upgrade day they were amazed to discover that someone from an office in Scotland called them and that all the machines were not in southern England at head office.

That said, I do think my colleagues in charge of the upgrade didn’t ask enough questions or thoroughly test demo systems – but then thier day job and expertise lies in outdoor education and play, not IT upgrades…

this was a favourite round our way the other week:

IT Dept: We’ve had a phishing attack. Can you mail all staff to say that if they get a mail with the phrase ‘click here to login and do XYZ’, they should delete it immediately?

Comms: Yup, no problem

24 hours later….

Comms: Our warning email appears to have had a 0% open rate. Any ideas?

IT: Let’s have a look. Ooh, it’s got the phrase ‘click here to login and do XYZ’ in it. We set up a filter to catch any emails with that phrase and delete them. It’s because of the phishing attack, you see.

Comms: ……

I chaired our IT committee for a few years. Some of my colleagues would regularly complain about the VPN because they were unable to watch the BBC whilst away on business. Also, 80% of the problems were (and still are) caused by just 2 members of staff with a unique talent for creating software conflicts and other problems…

I used to do a lot of work with NHS IT trainers. Circa 2010 I bumped into one such individual at an L&D exhibition and we started chatting about some s/w issues she and her team we’re experiencing. “The patch doesn’t work,” she said, “It doesn’t install when we download it to the RAM.”

I chose not to listen after that.

Problem with my bit of the NHS if not the rest is that we are expected to use IT without any training. Its not to bad for me but I have seen people unable to even open emails – because they don’t know how and GPs doing 2 finger typing.
Training us all in basic IT and typing would have saved so much time

Problem with my bit of the NHS if not the rest is that we are expected to use IT without any training. Its not to bad for me but I have seen people unable to even open emails – because they don’t know how and GPs doing 2 finger typing.

Hmmm, don’t necessarily disagree, but there’s a reciprocal problem with that. Some staff, no matter how many times you do train them on basic MS Office etc, seem to think “I’m not very good with computers” is a badge of honour, and a get-out-of-jail-free card to get someone else to do the work for them.

I know right, people who don’t know or care how IT works… thick as pig shit, if not thicker. **** em eh? 😏

Problem with my bit of the NHS if not the rest is that we are expected to use IT without any training

That issue is far from unique to the NHS or the public sector. I work in engineering so most of my colleagues are fairly computer literate but even so some systems are so obscure that even we can’t figure out how to work them. I’m looking at you SAP.

I HATE the way I can only use that system on a “monkey see, monkey do” basis.

SAP is the black hole that sucks the joy out of life.

SAP

Sold A Pup.

The other issue we have as well as not training people in IT is our main electronic record system while in many ways being fantastic (TRAK) is very counter intuitive and everything is three letter acronyms – so if you don’t know what they mean its very confusing. We do get trained on using it but some folk are comning from a position of never having used a computer – its the basic level training we need

I’m glad my days of end user IT support are long gone (except for my dad at least…). That said it’s not just users that cock-up IT, I’ve made a fair few howlers myself over the years…

1). We had a failed drive in an Exchange server (with RAID 5) at a customer site, an engineer had gone out to replace it and called me late at night just to double check the option he needed to use when booting it back up. He said “so I just select the ‘force online’ option right?” and without thinking (being half asleep) I replied yes and he hung up. I properly woke up a minute later (in a cold sweat) after I’d actually processed what had just been discussed and rang back in a panic, by which time he’d already forced it online and effectively hosed the server. My next 8 hours were spent driving to the customer site and rebuilding the server…

2). Early on in my career I was reading an article on better securing the account we used for backups and one of the things was to prevent it from interactively logging in (a common thing to do for service accounts). Anyway I blindly followed the article but managed somehow to implement it for all users not just the backup account and left for my lunch break shortly after. I came back to a major incident with no one being able to log in, oops (fortunately it was only for a few hundred users back then, not the several thousand it would be nowadays).

some systems are so obscure that even we can’t figure out how to work them. I’m looking at you SAP.

I only ever had to use it for booking my hours and that was a weekly struggle, like gonefishin I was reduced to bashing a learned sequence of keys rather than ever having any feel for what was going on. Horrendous thing, up there with Lotus Notes in the unintuitive software Hall of Shame.

Last job: A user called us with an issue with out software, she explained the error message but it made no sense. I asked her to send me a screenshot, thinking she would do it while I was on the phone. She said OK and abruptly hung up.

about 10 minutes later I get an e-mail, she’s taken a photo on her phone and emailed it to me, unfortunately, far enough away for me to actually see with any clarity what was on her screen.

Not the worst, we did also have someone scan their monitor when asked for a screenshot.

I’m so glad I moved jobs

I don’t (and would never) work in IT support, but I do get support issues down the line as a developer.

Have had the screenshot from the phone many times, and that’s understandable for some who don’t know how to do screenshots, but then next person in the line sticks it in a Word document and emails that to the next, who then prints it out to walk over to me a few desks away.

Also have had a video from a phone sent for a static screenshot.

perchypanther

Member
Sold A Pup.

Thought it was Stop All Production?

Oh god. How long have you got?

I landed my first IT job in 1992, in tech support, and have either worked in or liaised with tech departments for most of my career. That first job was for a large mail-order PC retailer selling mostly to people who had never owned a computer before. Those war stories you read on the Internet that you think must be myths, the CD-ROM cup holder and so forth, all true. I could write a book. Here’s a few randoms off the top of my head:

One guy complaining that his foot-pedal didn’t work. Cue a protracted conversation about where he’d got it from (us), no record of any gaming controllers on his invoice, yadda yadda… turned out that he’d got his shoe and sock off and the mouse on the floor.

Woman rang to request a bigger mouse mat, as she couldn’t reach the edges of the screen with the one she had.

Not my call, but someone requesting a transparent mouse as the one they had obscured the pointer on screen.

Asked someone to send us a copy of a disk for testing, they photocopied it and faxed it to us.

Chap had bought a memory upgrade and called because it wasn’t working. This was in the day you could buy 30-pin and 72-pin SIMMs, and he’d bought the wrong ones. Hang on though, the 72-pin modules are physically bigger than the 30-pin ones, how on earth had he installed them in the first place? Simple, he’d hacksawed an inch off the end of each one. (Er, no, we won’t be refunding those…)

I have many, many more, I might post a few more later.